I have been slow to post, as only the second alpha patch has dropped so far, with patches often coming rapidly with huge class changes every patch. Right now, balance is the only playable specialization for druids. In addition, there is much that is incomplete about balance druids including their artifact weapon traits. Many classes overall still have “awesome things coming soon”. However, druids so far are starting in really good shape.

First, our class hall artwork is absolutely incredible. I used to visit moonglade for fun sometimes and hang out. However, this new class hall is like “What would happen if we took moonglade and dialed it up to 11?” It definitely still has a night elf architectural feel, which makes sense given the history and lore of going to the place where malfurion learned to be a druid. This zone is not yet finished, with many orange flashing signs with “work in progress” posted around. You spend the majority of your time outdoors in this pretty large zone, but there are already some hidden places where you can find an indoor bed to take a nap if you so desire.

Second, the balance druid form artwork is in. The Tauren keep their horns. All other 3 races keep their antlers. In all cases, the coloring is the same as the original models. They have most of their animations in and complete, including retaining the same awesome dancing skills.

In terms of the balance druid rotation and play style, the “build and spend” resource model works out really well. It still feels familiar to the old playstyle, without having to watch the Eclipse bar dictate what spells to use – potentially offering even more room for choices to make in how you play. There is still a lot of work to do for ensuring that balance is a fun and effective specialization. I’ll comment more on specific abilities after another build or two and things stabilize a tiny bit more. There are a few places that need tweaking, such as some of the artifact weapon bonuses. For example, there is a risk of generating astral power so quickly that you feel like you have to frantically mash buttons to keep up. In the current build, some of the artifact bonuses also run the risk of making talents feel redundant with the artifact (such as not needing a talent to get instant-cast nukes when you passively get instant-cast nukes from the weapon, or not needing astral power generated via talents when you get tons of it from an ability you get with the artifact weapon). However, the current weaknesses are easily addressed in terms of balancing out the values of the talents and artifact weapons to not compete with each other. The major problems now are relatively minor compared to the problems brought to us by Eclipse.

The good news is that if you hated Eclipse, the new moonkin playstyle may be fun to learn. In addition, if you did like the complexity of balance and Eclipse, there are still plenty of opportunities for complexity (and we still start out with more buttons to manage than most other classes do before talents).

When restoration is in, I’ll start hitting dungeons and see how that goes. We also don’t know at what point we can pick up secondary artifact weapons for dual-spec leveling.

MMO-champion and others have started data-mining the Legion beta. This brings us lots of new pictures. It takes them a long time to go over every inch of a new game client, so they just started posting pictures of the new shapeshift forms. Below are a few of the views of the Tauren form. The colorings are still being worked out. Click on the links to see the full MMO-champion pictures (I cut a couple views from each so they weren’t so tiny on the blog).

Damage over Time (DOTs): We are keeping moonfire and sunfire which will each be a separate DOT that can be placed on the target. As such, the core rotation will require keeping high up-time on both DOTs. Sunfire has the ‘spread to nearby target’ mechanic, and moonfire is single-target only.

Astral power generators: Lunar Strike replaces starfire, and has an AOE cleave component. Wrath is now called Solar Wrath but otherwise mostly stays the same single-target.

AOE astral power spender: Starfall consumes astral power instead of having charges. It now has a large targeting circle you place on the ground, as the ‘targets the druid’ mechanic was somewhat difficult in execution. While this is a 15 yard radius targeting circle, we can extend the radius of this circle via talents. Targets in the circle take more DOT damage and the talented version would also let you cast while moving from within the circle.

Single-target astral power spender:Starsurge is instant-cast, consumes astral power, and provides 1 charge of Solar Power (buffs solar wrath) and 1 charge of lunar power (buffs lunar strike). This empowerment will require us to spend these charges

Eclipse was removed and we no longer watch the balance ‘bar’ on our interface.

Astral Power: Balance druids now have a ‘build and spend’ mechanic via a new Astral power resource. Our “builder” spells will generate astral power (e.g., solar wrath and lunar strike generate astral power). Our “spender” spells can be cast and use that astral power (starsurge and starfall), providing large benefits, such as Empowerments to our abilities.

New Mastery:Starlight Increases the damage of Starfall and Starsurge, and the effect of the Empowerments that they grant by an additional 30% (with Mastery from typical gear). This means that starlight doesn’t impact our core rotation in the way Eclipse does. It instead buffs spells you should be using anyway.

Analysis of overall changes:

The base rotation will be to keep up DOTs, use spells to generate astral power, and then spend astral power on your starfall/starsurge spells. The empowerment will mean you follow starsurge with one lunar strike and one solar wrath (then use the appropriate spell depending on need for cleave to keep earning power). Rinse and repeat! Keep in mind that there will be other abilities that aren’t included in this list, as well as talents that will have big impacts. It is easier to manipulate a resource like astral power than to manipulate the ‘charges’ mechanic that we used for starsurge and starfall in Draenor.

For AOE, we won’t have Hurricane anymore. Instead, the plan is for DOT spam, starfall, and lunar strike to be our AOE toolkit. It’s possible we could get other AOE from talents, but we haven’t seen the talents yet.

Overall, this new starting point is going to be beneficial for balance druids. This will provide an opportunity for the true “easy to learn, hard to master” spec. For a long time, balance has been the opposite: Eclipse was hard to learn (unless you had good addons), and easy to master once you got the core concept. Getting rid of the clunky Eclipse mechanic is good for balance druids. It frees balance druids from a system that never truly worked – there was never really a reason to swap between two sets of spells that were basically identical in all but name. While the initial rotation sounds super simple, there is plenty of room for skill to be rewarded by the time everything else has been revealed for druids. The talents will provide flexibility in terms of being able to choose talents that increase the complexity of the spec. You can choose all passive talents as a new druid OR choose more active talents for more complexity in advanced high-end raiding.

I will be highly active during beta testing and plan on raiding moonkin in Legion if all goes well. At this point, I think our rotation holds onto the core mechanics of being about weaving DOTs and direct damage.

Today was “class info release day” at Blizzcon. I will need to spend more time over the next few days writing about the Blizzcon announcement, but here are some major highlights from the class-specific Q&A that happened in the DMF area (that wasn’t available on the livestream):

All specs

Baseline, you will get fewer abilities for specs outside of your main specialization. So, balance won’t have a bunch of mostly useless bear, cat, and resto healing abilities. Instead, balance will pick a talent where you choose to have a secondary specialization in resto, feral, OR guardian. That secondary spec would be slightly weaker than the first. This allows Guardian druids to shift into moonkin form or cat form (depending on the talent choice they made) and do useful amounts of damage when their tanking partner taunts the boss off them. This same choice applies to cat and resto, as well.

Moonkin

Eclipse is gone. Playing the UI by watching the bar go back and forth just wasn’t a good playstyle. Never really worked well.

Balance has a focus on DOTs. Also gains and spends resources in a new way than Eclipse. This means balance gets a different mastery. Will keep existing DOT spells (moonfire, sunfire, starfall).

Balance will get Innervate as a specialization exclusive ability. Can cast innervate on other people: increase mana regen of your healer (or arcane mage!). No one else gets the ability to give mana to other players. This replaces Stampeding Roar which wasn’t thematically appropriate for balance.

The planned class blog will go live some time between Sunday and Tuesday, where you can learn a lot more details about these changes and more! I will work really hard beta testing balance along with the other balance theorycrafters. Once the info is live, I will work at collecting feedback and organizing it.

Restoration

They will reduce the rejuv spam feel of the spec, but overall the spec is in decent shape in terms of the overall toolset.

Resto will get a single-target “mark of the wild style” buff they can put on another player to boost them. No specific details on this. (this is in place of stampeding roar, which is guardian/feral exclusive. Turns out trees can’t actually roar.)

Changes to the talent system will impact how you specialize your heals for a fight. The talent changes will impact rotational play.

Guardian

Bears no longer dodge as their core tanking mechanic. It didn’t make sense that bear was all about dodge. That was really a mechanical thing that came from using Agility as the primary stat due to how gear worked. Magical dancing circus bears that dodged attacks is thematically inappropriate and won’t be around in Legion.

Bears will focus on armor and health instead – big beefy bears can take a hit and keep on going.

Vengence is gone. They will make the abilities and core mechanics of tanking classes work better without vengeance.

Tanking-related things in general will undergo some changes that are better discussed elsewhere by people who understand tank mechanics better than I do.

Feral

They didn’t announce much in the way of specific changes on the Q&A. There will be tweaks that fix some core problems, but no major overhaul like guardian and balance. They mentioned a couple little things like not casting rejuv in cat form. Details coming soonish.